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What a nice conversation. And how about this idea: “When Wagamese asks the “Old Woman,” his spiritual guide, what the purpose of his being alive is, she answers, “To learn about your relatives.” “My family?” he answers. She responds, “Yes. The moon, stars, rocks, trees, plants, water, insects, mammals. Your whole family. Learn about that relationship. How you’re moving through space and time together.
That’s why you’re alive.” (pg. 41) So different from our Western world view! So needed.” The whole idea that our purpose is to learn about, to meet, to get to know, maybe even to love, our relatives – now that’s an idea worth considering. It takes the process of theme of relationality and shows its relevance to lived experience.

I wonder if one of the values of process thought is to heal the bifurcation between third-person analysis of the cosmos as a network we behold and a first-person analysis of our own lives, as those who behold, I hope so. This may also be a healing of the bifurcation between science and religion.

Dear Gordon, thank you so much for your words about “What is Process Thought” and its many expressions today. Yes, it has come a long way from an exclusive interest in theology and the process understanding of God. Not that they aren’t important, but they are one voice among many.

“Important to this conversation is that Whitehead did not start out with some kind of hidden theological agenda; he was an agnostic of several decades standing. But at some point he found that he had to introduce some “actual entity” that could mediate “possibilities” to the actual occasions in their process of becoming.” – Thus Tom Gates writes, and he is right. While the idea o God (not Gawd) is very important to me; it is but one of twenty key ideas in the process tradition. It is very important to recognize that Whitehead offers many ideas, unrelated to God, which can change our lives, if we find them (relatively) true. I think there are at least eighteen, maybe nineteen. Please see my twenty key ideas of process thought.https://cobb.institute/educators-toolbox/what-is-process-thought-20-key-ideas/

Whitehead himself was not much influenced, if at all, by key figures in Western intellectual history: Freud, Jung, and Marx. Wish that it were otherwise. But his view certainly makes sense of both a personal and collective unconscious which shapes each and every moment of human experience. It is no accident that many Jungians find themselves at home with Whitehead. Sheri Kling’s slideshow shows the connections: https://cobb.institute/educators-toolbox/a-process-spirituality-whitehead-jung/

Such a good exchange. Thanks to everybody. And let me give a hearty “yes” to Bruce’s comment: “I really like how Jay Daniels finds many ways of talking about process thought through poetry and aesthetic language. He gives me courage to speak from my felt experience, where a more purely analytical perspective could find fault in that creative response.” If the process movement is to have an effect in world history, it must learn to speak in ways that are close to felt experience. That’s the existential Whitehead. A word about the idea that God is the soul of the universe. Whitehead and others use the word “soul” as synonymous with psyche. To say that God is the soul of the universe it to say that God is the psyche of the universe. This psyche is itself (himself, herself) a living whole in which the universe, and we ourselves, as psyches, are likewise gathered. We, too, along with other animals and with living cells, are “souls” in which the many of the universe become one in our own experience. Lots of souls.

Dennis…you can indeed be a process thinker, and for that matter a Whiteheadian, without embracing all that he says. This can well include skepticism with regard to his concept of God. There is a famous debate, within Whiteheadian circles, of whether or not Whitehead’s doctrine of God was necessary to his system. Donald Sherburne thought not. You can find his essay on this page: https://www.openhorizons.org/whitehead-without-god-donald-sherburne.html. Process non-theism is a viable option.

“Mental operations do not necessarily involve consciousness.” writes Whitehead in PR. But consciousness is an aspect of a certain kind of sense perception, which he calls perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. He writes: “We must first consider the perceptive mode in which there is clear, distinct consciousness of the ‘extensive’ relations of the world. These relations include the ‘extensiveness’ of space and the ‘extensiveness’ of time. Undoubtedly, this clarity, at least in regard to space, is obtained only in ordinary perception through the senses. This mode of perception is here termed ‘presentational immediacy.’ In this ‘mode’ the contemporary world is consciously prehended as a continuum of extensive relations.” All of this is to say that consciousness is a type of experience in which things in the world, and in the mind, are felt clearly. He thinks this clarity also includes a sense of contingency: what is consciously perceived or prehended “could not be, but is.” So…consciousness is clear and distinct perception, in the mode of presentational immediacy, that includes a contrast between what is and what could be.

Hello friends. I understand panentheism to be the view that everything is inside God in some way. Whitehead did not use the term, but some Whiteheadians do. Take a look at my own understanding on this page, if you’re interested: https://www.openhorizons.org/god-and-panentheism.html. Whitehead’s approach is, I suggest, relational panentheism but not emanationist panentheism. It emphasizes the mutual transcendence of God and the world and also the mutual immanence.

The solitariness of which Whitehead speaks in Religion in the Making resembles the “privacy” of which he speaks in Process and Reality. Every actual occasion, every concrescing subject, emerges out of felt (prehensive) relations with the past actual world and the realms of potentiality, and yet determines its own subjective aim, undergoes what Whitehead calls self-enjoyment, and has reality for itself. He speaks of this as a “private synthesis.” — “The concrescence, absorb- [131] ing the derived data into immediate privacy, consists in mating the data with ways of feeling provocative of the private synthesis. These subjective ways of feeling are not merely receptive of the data as alien facts; they clothe the dry bones with the flesh of a real being, emotional, purposive, appreciative.” This private synthesis is the flip side of the relatedness. The two – relatedness and privacy – do not contradict one another.

Kathleen writes: “I wonder if Whitehead would have altered his views knowing what we know know now about the deep connectedness of trees and the rhizomes of fungi, and the role of “mother” trees in directing nutrition and chemical alarms to other trees?” I think the answer is Yes. No question. Any firm insistence that trees are not subject of their lives, while animals are, is contrary to the spirit of process thought. Let the facts (the trees in this case) present themselves in their own ways, and teach us. That’s the spirit of process thought. We can change our minds, out of the listening. Here’s to the Wiradyuri,

Thanks to everyone, and a special note to Benjamin. I do think the notion of a formless sea is helpful in thinking about Creativity. I myself call it a creative abyss and sometimes use the metaphor of an ocean to explain it. However, with Whitehead and also with the influence of Zen Buddhism on me, I emphasize that it is not a creator, not an agent, and is not actual until actualized by the self-creativity of creatures and God. The Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy, with which Whiteheadians have been engaged for many years, speak of it as nothingness or no-thing-ness. You are right, that not many process thinkers really explore it in depth, because they are so oriented toward God. In any case, yours is, for me, a helpful metaphor. As for eternal objects, a question emerges: Are they co-eternal with the primordial nature or created by it. I think they are co-eternal. They, too, emerge from the fathomless and formless sea. So I think.

Hello friends. Eric, many wish Whitehead had chosen other language than “eternal object” for his notion of pure potentialities. Still, we can understand his general meaning: timeless potentialities that can be conceptually entertained or prehended, as in very abstract mathematics. For Whitehead, eternal objects are not more real than the world and they cannot actualize themselves. His ontological principle, dealt with in the third session, suggests that he gives primacy to actuality over potentiality when it comes to the reasons why things happen. Still, potentials are, for him, real. Not actual, but real. As I see things, the “ideas” of which you speak are closer to what he means by propositions than they are to what he means by eternal objects. Ideas are relevant potentials, seen as theories about what the world is like and how we might behave within it. They are half-way houses between pure potentials and actual fact. He speaks of them as lures for feeling. The pure potentials, by contrast, are so abstract that they need not be “relevant” at all. Imaginable, yes, but not actualizable in any foreseeable circumstance. As for why there is a “what next” to creativity – I just think that is a really good question. It’s not just asking about potentials, though, it’s also asking about why, in the next moment, there will be self-creativity:L an actualization of potentials. Why another act of self-creativity? I think his answer is that creativity, including self-creativity, is an ultimate reality we cannot go beyond. Even God is in its grip.

Chris, I think that our cosmologies can and do affect our first-person experience, and also that our first-person experiences shape our cosmologies. Usually our cosmologies are implicit not explicit. They are our presuppositions about what the world is like, and we ourselves within it. But the relationship is by all means two way, and both are changing. Make sense?

Tom, thanks so much for sharing, and what wonderful experience you bring to all of this. Your work with Nathaniel Lawrence makes you a hero to me, even though he had those issues with your paper. A word about initial aims and subjective aims. An initial aim is a fresh possibility from God, within the depths of experience, which is itself, to quote Whitehead, “the initial phase of the subjective aim.” The “subjective aim” is the actual aim that is chosen amid the concrescence as the organizing principle for the process. It can conform or not conform to the initial aim. Interestingly, the initial aim is not simply a possibility from God, it also carried within it a sense of divine desire: that is, God’s feeling or yearning that the possibility be actualized. Thus, at deep level of our lives, we feel God’s feelings. To be sure, we also feel a whole lot of other things, lures from our egos, from society, our bodies, the circumstance around us, etc., All of these, for good or will, condition the subjective aims that we choose. God’s lure is a profound one, but one of many in the depths of our hearts. Hence the need for discernment.